Just hang 10, Ben 10…

In the minds of some men, lurks the “10-10 Rule”. This means we can be 10kg overweight and 10 years older… but women will still find us devastatingly attractive.

Other men find it difficult to know exactly what league they should be playing in when it comes to the opposite sex.

Years ago, on an Independent Sunday newspaper which shall remain nameless, both editor and deputy fell for the wiles of a sexy young woman from London who, because her dad was a hack with the Daily Mail in Africa in the turbulent ’60s, thought she’d like to try her hand at journalism. The fact that she could not string an intelligible set of sentences together, never deterred her. She looked like the Page 3 models the British tabloids loved in those days – super superstructure, long blonde hair, even longer legs and partial to miniskirts which preserved her modesty only when she didn’t inhale too deeply.

She shamelessly played the vanity of the ageing editor and his younger, but married and still no spring chicken deputy. They clearly believed she found them irresistible.

Me? Not so much. I was a news editor (the most important job in any print rag, anyone will tell you) and I simply didn’t have the time to unravel the birds-nest of rubbish which had a habit of appearing on my screen late on deadline Saturdays.

On one such occasion, I put the story into the hold queue to get on with real journalism and was thus involved in editing when I felt a presence hovering behind me.

“How’s my story going?” she breathed in my ear in her best “come-to-bed” voice and then proceeded to lean in closer, resting one breast on my right shoulder and one on the left.

Apart from my embarrassment – manifested by hot blushing – I was angry because I knew I was being played. A woman like her would never have given someone like me a second glance unless she wanted something out of me.

Eventually, she got what she wanted – the editor took the copy away from me and spent more than an hour rewriting it. But the incident showed me, clearly, how the politics of sex worked. However, although both sides do play that game, the dice are heavily loaded in favour of men.

No matter what we look like, we only want the sexiest women for ourselves – and if we can’t get them through the old-fashioned, “willing buyer, willing seller” method, then we will use coercion and force. A lot of men are, simply, #Trash…

I was reminded of that this week with an uproar on social media over an oke called Donovan Tooth, owner of a clothing company called Panda, who went on a video rave effectively about “fat chicks”.

Dropping F-bombs everywhere, he ranted about “overweight, chubby women” who were being told “curves are beautiful and curves are strong…”

In his toxic cesspit of a mind, he described a photo of an anything-but-skinny model as “she’s got f…ing ten kilos to lose. Like, bitch get on the f…ing treadmill and lose the fat”.

Bro, demanding perfection means you will meet a lot of good looking, vapid, people and miss out on the really interesting ones. And, in the end, time is a great leveller. Muscle-bound jerks like you normally go to fat quickly as they age.

I feel sorry for your girlfriend or wife… it must be tough on Jonathan’s expectation treadmill.

Brendan Seery.

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